You may be wondering what on earth happened to those three baking and pastry lab classes I’ve been blogging about all semester since I dropped off the blogosphere several weeks ago.

Well, Finals happened. And, Final Exams are such a weird, stressful time that once they were done I pretty much parachuted onto the couch to lay around with my cats and watch back episodes of The Daily Show and 30 Rock re-runs. (Not really; I’ve actually been quite busy, but that’s what I would have liked to do. Or, go to Miami to lay on the beach and watch for dolphins.)

Final Exams are stressful, and even more so when they span several weeks. And, lately, they always seem to span several weeks.

The first Final Exam scheduled was the Intermediate Cakes Wedding Cake design project. I had been working on the design for a while. I was trying to keep it as clean and simple as possible, since that’s my jam, while incorporating all the necessary requirements. The project had to have combinations of certain elements in it: we had to work with several different paste mediums and showcase certain kinds of decoration techniques, etc., etc.

Here is the design:

This is the design draft for my Intermediate Cakes project. Theme: May Wedding.

That was the plan, anyway. And, it went pretty well, even in spite of all the ridiculous mishaps. Until I got to the buttercream. But, let’s back up to the beginning.

Trimming and torting these took a bit of time and care since they either had huge chunks missing which drastically reduced the size of my layer — or, like the bottom layer, it broke apart completely just by looking at it sideways and needed to be glued together with frosting. It was generally agreed upon that I had pulled the short straw in the cake lottery since all three of my layers were jacked in some way.

Sigh. Come on people who can’t even bake a cake in one piece, how did you make it this far???

I eventually got all those situations worked out, got the cakes prettied up, smoothed their final coat and had them ready for stacking when THIS piece of luck came my way:

Seriously? Some mystery bakers dinged my cake and didn’t say a word.

Yes, as the caption states, some mystery baker took a big chunk out of my cake and didn’t ‘fess up so when I went to pull my layers to stack them, that is what I found. So, it was back to the frosting, patching, and smoothing drawing board for me. I do believe my chef, who was shaking her head and kind of laughing while she said encouraging things like, “No problem, just patch it up — I’ve seen worse” was beginning to feel sorry for me at this point. I certainly wasn’t ahead of the game time-wise.

Staking the cake.

I finally got the cakes stacked and staked and could move on to decorating. The problem? I had less than 30 minutes to do it. That’s not good. Not good at all. And it was warm. Very warm. And the frosting was soft and getting softer by the second. And I was piping ribbons. And I had a baaaaaaaad feeling about this. Which, it turns out, was completely justified.

The ribbons went awry.

They were too soft, wouldn’t hold their shape, and kept drooping down or dropping off completely. The ribbons, layered, were supposed to cover the whole second tier, but they couldn’t even hold the weight of two rounds. That’s bad. There’s only so many royal icing butterflies one can stick on a cake to cover up seams and whatnot.

My brain was racing through all of the coping strategies I could employ for this situation, and none of them would work; there wasn’t time. The bad piping would have to stay. And, since I had three minutes left, I made it worse by trying to “fix it.”

We all know that never works.

My chef just looked at it and said, “If buttercream ribbons were so easy, everyone would be doing them.”

Which was actually pretty cool of her.

Finished product

The green “grass” went fine, I guess, but I can’t bear to look at the yellow “sun” or blue “sky” layers…ouch.

You can imagine my chagrin that I pulled off all the other aspects of this exam with aplomb only to tank on buttercream piping. So aggravating. And funny, I guess, if you think about it. Still, I wince when I look at it.

And the lesson I took with me into my next two finals is to know when to leave well enough alone. Sometimes, by “fixing” things, you make them worse. Or, at least, not better.

But, if you know me at all, you’ll know that leaving well enough alone is not in my nature so you won’t be surprised to hear that this will come up again during my Chocolates and Showpieces final.

The presentation tray. The Salt and Pepper bars I made are the unmarked squares on the left, but it’s the “Twix” bars in the middle which stole the show — they were amazing! I wish I had some of those right now, actually…

I thought it might be time for a little photo slideshow — especially since we just did another confections lab in Chocolates and Showpieces last week and ended up with trays of lovely chocolates.

In Intermediate Cakes, we played around with pastillage as a medium since we have to use several different pastes in our Wedding Cake design project, and we did a buttercream frosting tasting. Very interesting to have so many different buttercream styles side by side. When it comes to frosting, it is definitely different strokes for different folks.

Right now I am prepping for my final projects. Today is the first of a two day Wedding Cake design project, so I’ll get back to you about that. In the meantime, you can see my design draft in the slideshow, along with my design model for a different design project: my Sugar Centerpiece. Yes, I assemble models like a third grader. What can I say? The cutting and the pasting are not my thang.

This is the design draft for my Intermediate Cakes project. Theme: May Wedding.

Birds about to be etched in cocoa on pastillage.

Experimenting with pastillage shape for wedding cake topper.

A buttercream tasting — seven different recipes side by side to compare taste, texture, color, and pipe-ability.

This frame is for a Strawberry Balsamic Butter Ganache (that’s passionfruit on the left for a different confection).

These are macadamia nuts on dark chocolate discs piped with a milk chocolate and rum ganache. They are about to get their dark chocolate bath!

This is the caramel for the Salt and Pepper bar I was making in class — right before my thermometer went haywire and I scorched the caramel — couldn’t really tell, but STILL!

The presentation tray. The Salt and Pepper bars I made are the unmarked squares on the left, but it’s the “Twix” bars in the middle which stole the show — they were amazing! I wish I had some of those right now, actually…

This is the design model for my sugar centerpiece. I’m really hoping this model doesn’t do the final piece justice…